Friday, March 29, 2024

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GUEST COLUMN

July is freedom month in America and this is a series of articles about FREEDOM. Last week we saw that according to the Bible, ALL Freedom comes from God (2 Corinthians 3:17). Sometimes we take for granted that FREEDOM is one of the great blessings in life that He makes available to those who’re willing to receive it, take care of it, defend it, and enjoy it. Among other things, people can use it for making a FREE choice to accept OR reject the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Contrary to popular belief, true biblical Christianity is NOT about pressuring people to accept Jesus, because God as the originator of freedom doesn’t work that way.

Have you ever noticed that the freer a country is the more prosperous it seems to become? Another way of saying that is, the freer the country the more closely connected it is to God. We’re living in the freest country that’s ever existed, and it’s also the most PROSPEROUS. PROSPERITY by the way is a bible word that’s mentioned there more than ninety times as a BLESSING from God.

Biblical PROSPERITY is closely related to a particular economic system called FREE Enterprise. When FREE Enterprise is grounded in biblical principles, it will ALWAYS be successful and out perform any other economic system ever attempted. But, it operates at its best in an environment of universal FREEDOM that can only come from the presence of God. Enterprise without God isn’t really free.

PROSPERITY didn’t come to us because we were smarter than the rest of the world or because we have more natural resources or because the rest of the world is lazy. No, the driving forces behind American success have been RELIGIOUS FREEDOM and the Christian Bible. We have been FREE to apply ourselves as we want to, believe as we want to and live our lives as we want to BECAUSE we’ve been willing to involve the Lord of the Bible in our governance. He’s the One who makes FREEDOM available to people. In fact, when left to ourselves, we-the-people will ALWAYS work toward restricting freedom so we can control others. God has to stay involved or people on their own will eventually ruin everything.

Until recently, average family income in the US had been declining for decades. Employment had also been decreasing. Is it possible that these things were the predictable result of efforts by many Americans to reduce the involvement of God in our culture? According to the Bible, He doesn’t want His involvement reduced but He allows it to happen if that’s what people want. All we have to do is reduce religious freedom by restricting God’s involvement in our way of life. Of course when we do that, the purity of the FREE Enterprise system becomes corrupted which causes PROSPERITY and blessing to decline.

The bottom line is if we want our country to preserve its historical PROSPERITY, there’s a strong argument to be made for defending FREEDOM. Even for those who don’t like bible-based Christianity, the facts of history are irrefutable: FREEDOM prospers. Even for the many who would choose to use their freedom to reject Jesus, they would be way better off economically to support bible-based governance anyway because it’s the ONLY road that ever leads to real economic blessing.

NEXT WEEK: THE STEWARDSHIP OF FREEDOM